From Bagram to Boulder: A soldier's perspective on Afghanistan

U.S. Army Maj. Charles Brant Clark of Boulder has served for nearly 20 years as a reserve officer with deployments in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Europe and Afghanistan. A plaque with his battalion patches is in the background. He recently returned from a yearlong stint in Afghanistan. If Afghanistan had received all of the soldiers, money and attention that Iraq did, we would probably be leaving it for good this year, he said.
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No one needs to tell U.S. Army Maj. Charles "Brant" Clark, back in Boulder from a recent tour of duty in Afghanistan, that things aren't going well in the war-torn country.

There are the numbers.

-- August ranks as the deadliest month for the U.S. military in Afghanistan -- with 47 troops killed -- since the war began nearly eight years ago after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. As U.S. troop casualty totals top 800 in nearly eight years of fighting there, a recent CNN/Opinion Research Corp. poll showed that 57 percent of Americans oppose the war -- up from 52 percent in early August.

There is last month's controversial election.

Maj. Charles Brant Clark plays with his dogs, Shamus and Nijo, in his backyard in Boulder last week.
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-- The U.N.-backed Electoral Complaints Commission has received more than 2,000 allegations of fraud as votes in the presidential contest continue to be tallied across the country.

And there is last week's report from the U.S. commander in Afghanistan.

-- Gen. Stanley McChrystal called the situation there "serious" and that future success "demands a revised implementation strategy."

Clark, with the Army's 831st Transportation Battalion, said there is nothing surprising in the grim drumbeat of negative news coming out of Afghanistan.

As long ago as 2005, when the 41-year-old reserve officer was on his second tour of duty in the Middle East, he was calling the campaign in Afghanistan "the forgotten war."

"Afghanistan, where the fight should have been, became a sideshow," said Clark, tirelessly playing a game of fetch with his dog in the backyard of his downtown Boulder home on a recent morning. "If Afghanistan had received all of the soldiers, money and attention that Iraq did, we would probably be leaving it for good this year."

Instead, the country remains enmeshed in an intractable battle with insurgents and the Taliban eight years after the terrorist attacks that spurred the war in Afghanistan in the first place.

Maj. Charles Brant Clark holds his Bronze Star certificate. He received the award for 'exceptionally meritorious service' in supervising the movement of more than 25,000 containers of cargo.
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Clark is leaving the military for good this year after serving nearly 20 years as an Army reserve officer with deployments in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Europe and Afghanistan.

He grew up in Boulder and Europe, attending Boulder High School for a short time before finishing his formal education in Belgium, where the U.S. Army had stationed his father.

A self-professed longtime climbing and biking bum, Clark now works as a development test engineer for Cisco Systems in Boulder and plans to marry in October.

"I'm tired of getting shot at," he said matter-of-factly.

Mostly glum outlook

Clark said the downward trajectory of the war became all the more evident during his most recent tour -- a yearlong stint at Bagram Air Field that ended in April.

He oversaw and coordinated for the Army all overland non-munitions shipments -- lumber, non-perishable food, truck engines, toilet paper -- into Afghanistan from neighboring countries, notably Pakistan. He received the Bronze Star for "exceptionally meritorious service" in supervising the movement of more than 25,000 containers of cargo.

He said he and his fellow soldiers felt "intense frustration" as they saw Iraq get the lion's share of the military's attention.

Perfectly good water purification systems that he needed remained packed in boxes in Iraq, Clark said. The same procurement issues happened with a batch of radios, he said.

Only as the Bush administration entered its final months, Clark said, did Afghanistan begin to register as a critical conflict zone at the Pentagon.

"Suddenly, Afghanistan wasn't the forgotten war anymore," he said.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates has urged patience with the war effort, telling reporters last week that he would be comfortable with a larger U.S. military presence in Afghanistan as long as the increase reassured the country's citizens that the Americans were there for the benefit of Afghans.

"I don't believe that the war is slipping through the administration's fingers," Gates said. "I absolutely do not think it is time to get out of Afghanistan."

But Clark, who speaks directly yet chooses his words carefully, questions whether it's too late to get things right in a country hobbled by decades of war, tribal conflict and intense poverty.

Maj. Charles Brant Clark of Boulder pours water on his head on wet Friday during his recent tour in Afghanistan.
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The Aug. 20 presidential election, which has produced accusations of fraud, is illustrative of the country's problems, he said.

"In the latest election, where corruption has become much, much worse, the government lost even more legitimacy in the eyes of the people," Clark said.

He said President Barack Obama's appointment of McChrystal in June to head up forces in Afghanistan was the right move because the general represents a shift in focus from trying to achieve a traditional military victory to a more pragmatic resolution to the quagmire.

"The change in direction, the change in focus, is welcome," Clark said.

At the same time, he wonders why things continue to look much like they always did, with more troops headed to Afghanistan and more money channeled to beefing up infrastructure on U.S. military bases throughout the country.

He said the combat strategy should have shifted long ago from one that relies largely on conventional forces to one that places a greater focus on nimble and surgical special operations forces.

"We put guys in a war that think one way that requires guys that think another way," Clark said. "You have to think the way the special operations community does. If you have to destroy the village to save it, you've lost."

He was hoping under Obama for a draw down of the more than 60,000 U.S. troops deployed in Afghanistan.

"I had hoped to see a major reduction in conventional forces in the near term, and that's not apparently happening," Clark said.

He said he wouldn't be surprised to see the United States with a significant presence in Afghanistan for the next 12 to 15 years.

"It happened to the British twice, it happened to the Russians, and it's happening to us," Clark said of the United States' eight-year involvement in Afghanistan.

Jonathan Adelman, a professor of international studies at the University of Denver, agrees that a protracted American presence in Afghanistan is inevitable.

Obama, he said, has not put into place an effective strategy for reestablishing stability in the country. He said increasing troop strength -- as was done with the surge in Iraq -- isn't necessarily the answer.

"It's very strange to see the administration misapplying what did work in Iraq," Adelman said. "Afghanistan is going to be much harder to apply the lessons of Iraq."

He said Afghan president Hamid Karzai, who is leading in the election based on a partial vote count, isn't an inspirational figure in a country that is largely fragmented along tribal lines.

"Over there, there is no sense of nationhood -- the identity is with the tribe," Adelman said.

'Important voice'

Carolyn Bninski, with the Rocky Mountain Peace & Justice Center, said a voice from the battlefield carries a certain credibility that can cut through the political grandstanding that often surrounds the war.

The Boulder-based group opposes the war and held a rally in Boulder last month to protest the U.S. military presence in Afghanistan.

"To have somebody who has actually been there and has seen the results of the policy, and says this doesn't work and why -- it's a very important voice," she said. "It draws a picture. It puts a concrete picture in peoples' minds. It's a brave thing to do."

Bninski said there is a growing number of vets who are saying the United States should get out of Afghanistan, the sooner the better.

Clark said he hasn't made his feelings about the war public until now and hesitated to do so because he hasn't felt it would be appropriate.

"One of the parts of being in the professional military is that it doesn't matter who the politicians are in charge, you are still going to do your job to the best of your ability," he said.

And he said his job wasn't making policy or directing the war -- it was about helping the fighting forces with whatever they needed.

"It's not about me," Clark said. "Everything we do is about the guys that are up there in the hills."

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